There are groups of people out there, Smartphone Gearheads is what I call them, who live for the thrill of pushing these tiny computers as far as they can go. These are the same guys who whipped out their lead pencils and cracked open their computer shells in High School when they heard it would speed up their computers. Really great, extremely clever guys, but a little nutty when it comes to pushing these processors.

I admit, when they pushed the Nexus One to 1.24GHz I was one of the first in line to give it a shot. Granted, that’s not a big jump from 1 to 1.24, but it was exciting that I might see some added performance. The numbers on my benchmark apps went up, but nothing FELT any faster. So I sought out to see if it was just me, or if it’s the same for all of the Android phones, particularly the newer ones. Is there a genuine performance increase, or is this little more than a “because I can” placebo?

If you follow the Android modding communities, you have already seen handsets like the Samsung Vibrant and the HTC G2 with rather significant overclocking compared to the Nexus. The Vibrant, with it’s Stock 1.0Ghz Hummingbird processor was claimed to be clocked at 1.6GHz, while the G2 800MHz Scorpion Core was recently spotted at 1.8 GHz. This seems excessive to me, and makes me ask the obvious questions regarding decreasing battery life and, more importantly, whether or not any ACTUAL performance increase was felt. After all, if you are going to more than double the stock output of your processor and murder your battery life, you should get SOMETHING out of it, right?

Well, for starters, these benchmark apps are not really specific as to HOW they get their information, so playing with the numbers a little bit is a parlor trick, as Cyanogen demonstrated recently. Any element of the benchmark can be modified to produce greater responses, while the performance never actually improves. Back when the G1 was overclocked to 650MHz, even the creator of the mod later admitted that the boost was merely placebo. Again, we’re dealing now with much larger leaps, and much faster hardware, so the same may not necessarily be true.

One user I interviewed, Ryan Mills, claims that the jump between 800MHz and 1.4GHz was met with increased metrics in his personal benchmarks, but also made the phone feel faster. Apps loaded with increased performance, and the general feel of the phone was improved. He did continue to say, however, that as the modders began to increase beyond 1.4 GHz, there was no continued increase in performance. Anyone who has picked up a G2 or MyTouch HD can attest that they are already plenty fast enough, and I doubt that beyond a certain point there would be any visual performance increases, so this makes sense to me. Furthermore, aside from SOME games and apps like Google Sky, I don’t see any reason to assume there would be any further performance increase.

So is it a placebo effect? On the newer Android phones, it appears there is a genuine performance increase to a certain degree, but beyond that the increase would not be noticeable on a daily basis, aside from the battery life you would be sure to lose, not to mention your new portable space heater. I feel it’s also worth mentioning that the only way to see these benefits is to gain root access to your device, a process which voids your warranty in many cases. So, you have voided your warranty, and are now pushing your processor well beyond the designed intention. Sounds like if you aren’t careful, there’d be tears in your future.